'In one hand I held a video camera. In the other hand I held photographs of my sister.'

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Absence is the subject of John Gillies’ My Sister’s Room, 2000. This intimate portrait reveals how memory is assembled and how loss becomes something that is lived with, something that assumes its own form. Gillies has been making rigorously interdisciplinary work for more than two decades in Australia. His work often possesses a hypnotic quality as it enters into states of alienation and loss, hinting at the paranormal and referring to the power and uselessness of images. In My Sister’s Room, a portrait is slowly articulated of the artist’s sister who passed away. Are photographs what we bring to mind as recollected images, or is it our experience embedded as still-frames in our memory? Is one a more authentic memory than the other? The emotive stain is no less present in both. Gillies is committing his own knowing of this sister as he draws a spatial portrait of recollection that burns the edge between the filmic and phenomenological worlds

John Gillies’ remarkable My Sister’s Room (2000) is built from humbler and very different transformations made by the artist holding a video camera in one hand and photographs of his late sister in the other. The photographs pixelate into shimmering yellows and golds and the occasional wavering of the artist’s hand eerily triggers apparent movements in the face. The work becomes a moving meditation on the act of looking at photographs.

In My Sister’s Room John Gillies uses a single face to explore the dialectic between absence, performance and representation – grainy, super-enlarged photographic stills of his late sister’s face projected onto one wall of a blackened room, accompanied by a soundtrack made up of the many indistinct sounds a person makes as they move quietly about a room. On one level the face in My Sister’s Room activates the kind of physiognomic scrutiny invited by all films: a compulsion to search the face for signs of a unique character, a mirror of the soul. This viewing position is, however, undermined by a persistent flickering on the screen. The slight movements of the frame generated by the hand held camera technique reveal that this is a work of re-photography: an image of an image. In this moment of revelation our perception coincides with the filmmaker’s. Taking us beyond concepts of character and identity, My Sister’s Room allows us to feel something of the intense longing to reverse the powers of death, to re-activate the dead. In the same instant, it exposes the cruel nature of the camera’s pretense to satisfy this desire. Film cannot re-present what is absent. Its images are only ever a trace of what was. And to see this, as we are forced to do in My Sister’s Room, is to understand in the most profound and devastating way that the dead exist only as an image.